Hornetsecurity VM Backup vs. Macrium Reflect

Do you have VMWare? Yes I can back it up. Do you have Hyper-V? Yes I can back it up. That in itself should speak for itself. Altaro has really given a great deal into their software, not only making it easy to use, BUT also a really good and reliable product where you can support your workloads hassle-free, and super lightweight

Incentivized

Macrium Reflect is one of the best partition backup applications available in the market. It can also clone drives in addition to making images of partitions and has a very useful feature of creating a bootable recovery drive for restoring partition(s) in case the OS is not booting. There are also different products for varying needs of the end user- Macrium Reflect Server, Workstation, etc. I have restored my system without any errors many times with Macrium.

Incentivized

• Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running.
• Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost.
• Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective.
• Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play.

Incentivized

• Clear interface for creating drive image backups
• Reliable, every day backups
• Accessible log showing successful backups and any failures
• Creates differential backups that are small in size
• Fast, easy method for recovering individual files or folders from an image backup

Incentivized

• More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too.
• It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive.
• Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues.

Incentivized

• Has ransomware protection that could be better at letting users configure exeptions

Incentivized

It simply works and it is making our lives easier. The renewal process is also really good

Incentivized

A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs

Incentivized

There is a small learning curve in the beginning, but altogether a great tool for my purpose.

Incentivized

One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.

Incentivized

We have not been opening tickets for support from Macrium at the moment, only for licencing issues, but good attention and fast response by the support team. They respond pretty fast to our emails and fixed our issues giving us a good explanation of our case without any complications. Due to the good functionality of the software we have not opened a ticket for support in years.

Incentivized

Altaro has really designed their product so well that you can honestly implement this within a couple of minutes

Incentivized

The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.

Previously, I used Acronis as my company purchased licensing for years. It's great, but I found Macrium Reflect more straightforward, and the free version has been perfect for personal use.

Incentivized

• Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running.
• The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up.
• Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost.

Incentivized

• Reduce the impact of emergency situations like ransomware attacks, hardware failures, etc.
• Restore the backups quickly and reliably.
• Free version availability for commercial use is an added bonus.

Incentivized